Bare Necessity.

Tomorrow, Steve is coming round at the crack of dawn to plaster the downstairs loo (I refuse to call it a bathroom, as discussed in previous Blips, it doesn’t have a bath) so today I have to remove all the fixtures and fittings pausing only to take a Blip. Perhaps, when it’s finished, I’ll post a follow-up Blip; just don’t hold your breath.
 
I relied heavily on Nik’s Viveza for the post-processing, and had expected to need their HDR software as well - but it turned out that I had enough information in a single RAW file.
 
Now that Google have extracted their “pound of flesh” from the Nik suite that they bought the rights to a few years ago, they have decided to drop it and leave its wide user-base without any support. In the meantime, it remains usable as long as Microsoft don’t add features to Windows making it incompatible with Nik and Adobe show the same consideration with Photoshop. Possible solutions to the problem proposed by users include keeping an old computer, denuding it of all software apart from the operating system, the Nik package and a host freeware photo manipulation programme. You are then left with a working procedure that passes back and forth between two computers, one of which doesn’t have access to the internet. The question is, do I value it enough to go to those lengths?